Medium- and high-voltage electric cables are often installed underground. Medium- and high-voltage electric cables are expensive and generate large amounts of heat when passed through by electrical current. Burying these cables underground in a mass of soil and rock or other like or similar mass of inert material not only protects the cables from damage and theft, but also dissipates heat generated by the cables.
A typical underground cable installation involves forming a trench, laying cables onto the bottom of the trench, and then backfilling the trench with fill material, such as soil, sand, rock, concrete, or other selected fill material or combination of materials. In some applications, a preliminary base layer of inert material is laid down onto the bottom of the trench onto which cables are placed, which is followed by the application of a covering layer of inert material that together with the previously deposited base layer form the mass of inert material completely incorporating the cables.
Installing medium- and high-voltage electrical cables underground is intensely labor intensive. As a result, skilled artisans have devoted considerable time, effort, and resources toward developing not only specialized, mechanized trenchers used in forming trenches, but also implements used to apply electric cables to formed trenches. Although significant advancements have been made in the field of laying underground cable, particularly in the advancement of improved trenchers and associated cable-laying implements, comparatively little attention has been directed to improving the architecture of multi-cable, underground installations, and to specialized implements adapted to concurrently lay multiple cables in arrangements designed to allow the installed cables to better withstand the load applied to the cables from the fill material within which the cables are buried, and to dissipate heat more efficiently, all of which contribute to prolonged cable life coupled with improved cable performance.